Pesonalized Education

This topic really stumps me if I am being honest, because I feel like I have to choose one side or the other. Personalized Education sounds so good from the side that class and lectures can be boring and freedom in education could make more kids want to learn, but it also sounds horrifying when you think about less structure leading to less caring in some students. I found a lot of great things about Personalized education when researching it. For starters, “It embraces the highly defensible tenet that learning has to happen  in  students, not  to  them, and it recognizes the reality that the diversity of students in today’s classrooms makes it impossible to claim that one-size-fits-all learning makes sense.” (Tomlinson). I believe that everything should be done in moderation and that remains true when I am looking at this topic. I believe getting rid of curriculum and letting students decide individually what they want to do would leave a lot of kids lost in the future.I know if I had a choice when I was in school not to do math, then I would not have done it, because I hated math. Now, because I sat through all those classes and grudgingly learned the content I am able to use math and the real worlds and found out that I actually love math. I think the biggest issue with Personalized Education is that it focuses on letting students learn whatever they want to become whatever they want, but doesnt give them the foundation they need to do this. “What a child is capable of learning depends upon what she already knows. When a child encounters new information, if she lacks the preexisting knowledge to put the information in context, she will quickly become frustrated. She won’t learn. So to the extent personalization seeks to devolve a greater degree of the responsibility of acquiring new knowledge to students, it relies on the mistaken assumption that many or most students are properly equipped to make sense of new information”(Riley). Too much freedom can be a bad thing, just as not enough freedom can also be a bad thing. My school currently uses personalized education in the since that if a kid is excelling in a subject they do not make them stop at whatever grade they are supposed to be in according to their age. They allow those student to keep bumping up to whatever grade they are understanding the content and being challenged at.